Thursday, April 23, 2015

And The Burying The Lede Award Goes To...

Political polarization is on the rise, and with it come lots of clevernewwaysto visualize that polarization. I've even taken a crack at it myself. A group of researchers recently gave it another go in a paper published in PLOS One, and while it doesn't tell us anything we don't already know, it's nonetheless one of the more effective visualizations of rising partisanship that I've seen.

And waaaay down at the bottom, in the second to last sentence of the article, the patient reader will find this:

And while this visualization is effective at showing the parties peel away from each other, it misses some other nuances about polarization -- for instance, that current trends are largely driven by Republicans moving away from the center.

"Nuance"?

The Right has conducted a relentless, 30 year campaign to destroy political comity in this country, on purpose, to win elections.

Period.

Conservative have made such a wasteland of the Middle -- on purpose, to win elections -- that just touching Barack Obama or whispering the word "compromise" can kill a Republican political career overnight. And floating high above this toxic cesspit, the "Both Siderists" have built an entire new, entirely imaginary Center into which they insist Democrats must ascend if they want to be taken seriously by the Very Serious People.